‘Don’t sell the land’: BIPOC farmers are gearing up for agriculture policy under Trump

Farmers of color are not backing down.

John Boyd Jr., a fourth-generation Virginia farmer, civil rights activist and president of the National Black Farmers Association, delivered a fiery keynote speech at the 2024 BIPOC Farmers Conference in Smyrna, Delaware, on Nov. 12, as Black, Indigenous and other farmers of color face potential reversal of years of slow agriculture policy progress.

While the event celebrated BIPOC communities in agriculture, with networking, resource-sharing and tech demos for a new generation of farmers, the reality of challenges ahead as a second Trump administration approaches loomed over the event.

Boyd’s fight against the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) over its discrimination against Black farmers, including refusing to process aid to Black farmers and fast-tracking foreclosures, started in the ‘90s. As a young activist, he rode a wagon pulled by two mules — a reference the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” — to Washington, DC, to stand up against those actions. 

By 1999, Boyd had helped secure a $1 billion payout to Black farmers. It was just the beginning of a more than 30 years long fight.

Flash forward to today, in July 2024, a $2 billion payout for 23,000 Black farmers found to have been discriminated against by the USDA was approved by the current administration through the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program. It’s part of the Inflation Reduction Act — a program threatened by the incoming one, as Vice President-elect JD Vance has misrepresented it as “benefits” given out based on skin color rather than restitution.

“The next four years are going to be a living hell for a whole lot of us,” Boyd said to a diverse audience of farmers, policymakers and agriculture students. “But don’t give up when the road is rough. Sometimes you gotta rock with it.”

The biggest message of the event? Hold on to your land if you have it.

“Don’t sell the land,” Boyd said. “Generational wealth is being able to pass on land ownership to the next generation of farmers. That’s what my whole fight was about. It wasn’t about a loan.”

What else we saw at the Delaware State University-sponsored conference

“One of the goals of our tribal community is to create, build a community supported agriculture project,” Chief Dennis Coker of the Lenape Tribe of Delaware, said, “and access to land is our challenge. We have plenty of land around us, but it’s not ours.”

“Del Monte has been a good company that has been supporting the cause and the mission of Black Farmers in this country,” Boyd said in a response to a question about company support for the farmers, “and they’ve done it in a very open and visible way.” Fortune 500 companies, however, have been a struggle, he said.

“[My family] didn’t come here until the naturalization and immigration rights that followed the civil rights movement,” James Lee, president of the Georgia Korean Farmers Association, said.

“[This administration] has said our job is not to seek efficiency, but to keep farmers farming — it’s a radical departure,” said Scott Marlow (L) of the USDA Farm Service Agency said on a mental health and farming panel. “We went from about 125 farm foreclosures a year to 12 over four years.”